Hello
I know nobody replied to me and I would love to know this one thing if you could please answer me.
Is a share a block found in Claymore? How do you tell the difference between a share and a block if not?
I'm solo mining picking up shares so i'm just wondering if I actually mined any blocks or not.
Answer would be greatly appreciated
share is-SHARE. Pool is finding blocks and calculating your part, using shares.
If you getting shares - you are mining on the pool. So try to find @ pool stats who gets block(s).
If you mine solo - you will find block ( in this life ) if you have 1000+ cards. Maybe.
Try wiki ( mining, pools, shares, blocks )...
This is not accurate. With 30 cards you can find ETH block mining solo in 5 days.
A share is a "tool" used by the pools to measure the contribution of the miners to the block solving effort.
I will use some extracts of the bitcoin wiki to help to explain.
First you need to understand the "difficulty" concept of POW blockchains :
Extract from :
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MiningMining a block is difficult because the SHA-256 hash of a block's header must be lower than or equal to the target in order for the block to be accepted by the network. This problem can be simplified for explanation purposes: The hash of a block must start with a certain number of zeros. The probability of calculating a hash that starts with many zeros is very low, therefore many attempts must be made. In order to generate a new hash each round, a nonce is incremented. As mentionned above, finding a block (ie finding a hash > target difficulty) is quite complicated and can take days for a solo miner.
Therefore, the pool sets a sub-difficulty setting for the shares :
It will count submitted solutions with a difficulty that is lower than the blockchain's actual difficulty. The miners will submit every valid share to the pool.
Then once a block is found by someone on the pool (ie when a share that meets the target difficulty of the blockchain is found), the block reward will be distributed among the miners depending on how many shares they submitted during the round (in case of a Pay per Share model).
Simply put, a share is a lesser solution of the block finding. It's worth nothing but it allows the pool to retribute miners in a fair way for their effort.
You can also read this for more infos :
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Pooled_mining